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Dear Employees

Guest Blog by Assumpta Ozua first ‘brilliantly’ delivered at The Hospital Club during Sustainability Week. Inspired by our collective inaction on Climate Change….

Dear Employees
It’s raining hours on your minutes
while you wish it would just shower seconds
until I adjust my tone enough for you
to feel more at ease and let you go home but

the mood in this room is now
ten degrees above tolerable
and I for one cannot continue
to work in silent ignorance anymore
and so I must tell you,

Yesterday, I noticed crescendoed coughs shake
gluttonous juicy joints basted in the
crystalline sweat of success while you
periodically marked territory around the water cooler
trading hot air for iceberg grins while,
your facades – melted by truth, dissipated
into a tidal wave of ambivalence.

This office has a fever and you’re the one to blame!

Your lives of excess and wastage will one day,
someday soon, put us all to shame.

Management are not blind, nor are we deaf,
we have heard the cries of discomfort and unrest
when the impetuous air conditioning has
been left wheezing into your cubicles

so you retaliate with insomniac electricals
ever ready – waiting for their chance to shine,
but did you know that leaving appliances on standby
steals unnecessary energy all the time?

Did you know that the current rate of deforestation
to produce the paper you use so freely
could mean that by 2110,
all of our forests will cease to be?

Did you know that reducing
the number of miles you drive weekly
by carpooling with co-workers
or cycling and walking
would severely reduce your
carbon dioxide emissions yearly?

Did you know?
Do you care?

Will you change, your nonchalant approach to the fact that
we are the privileged 20% of the populous who
consume 80% of the Earth’s natural resources,
and if that fact alone does not a fire in you stoke,
Please excuse me while I choke
on your lackadaisical fumes.

And for those who sit here bored, thinking
“I have heard this all before”

How do you callously choose to lose more and more of
our world’s natural resources
with little thought for the consequences?

You reinforce the stereotype that
corporations have no conscience.

But we do.

And if you don’t get on board too,
should you decide that ecological awareness
is too costly a price to pay for you,
then I am sorry to say that
YOU’RE FIRED!